DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR
Strategic Planning and Capacity Building
With over 25 years of nonprofit management experience, Karen is a sought-after trainer, consultant, community advocate and public speaker, especially recognized for her work in sectors including: mental health and addictions supports, opening access and opportunity for people with disabilities, various Veteran focused causes, adaptive recreation, health equity, creating lasting solutions to homelessness, empowering youth and revitalizing rural communities.
In her youth, Karen was an Olympic Trials Qualifier in athletics and joined the US Army as an athlete ambassador. While serving, Karen continued her clinical mental health work and helped to design the Army wide Critical Incidence Response Teams. Adept at program design and implementation, Karen worked in community mental heath, medical social work, emergency psychiatry, child and adolescent psychiatry and served as a leader for the Pacific Rim Critical Response Team. While responding to a “suicide by cop” emergency scenario, Karen was paralyzed while saving the life of a Marine.
Transitioning from the military meant a new life navigating the universe as a person utilizing a wheelchair, which shaped her perspective and launched a life of advocacy to ensure that people with disabilities had every opportunity to thrive. Karen began developing programming and funding resources in clinical mental health settings supporting people experiencing chronic homelessness with persistent mental health issues and addictions. Karen’s unique housing models met clients where they were at and included housing first, shelter plus care, and a wide array of affordable and attainable housing strategies.
Experienced at every level of non-profit management from case management, program development, resources development and fundraising to Executive Leadership, Karen now focuses on empowering NPO’s to build capacity through strategic planning, bench-marking and organizational development, developing robust diverse fundraising strategies and board development while havingextensive experience designing, implementing, measuring and evaluating and directing innovative programs that meet critical community needs.
Her approach is relationship-oriented and strength-based with the ultimate end goal of creating equitable, inclusive, positive environments for all people to thrive. She thrives on working with people to solve complex social, organizational, and leadership challenges. Whether organizational mission impact, leadership effectiveness, or large-scale social issues, she works toward understanding the whole system and finding creative and engaging solutions.
She has worked with the full spectrum of organizations, from small, grassroots organizations to large national organizations She has won hundreds of millions of dollars for clients through successful grant writing at the local, State and Federal levels, sets up systems for grant management while empowering those nonprofits to build internal grant writing and grant management skills.
Throughout her career, Karen has also excels in unlocking hidden potential in the donor bases of the organizations she has served. A creative thinker, her entrepreneurial approach to fundraising often breaks the mold of convention with creative approaches to major gifts, endowments, planned-giving, campaigns, peer to peer and appeals.
Karen brings 3 key strengths to the table: an intense drive to make progress toward an organization’s mission, a demonstrated ability to foster collaboration that solves problems and creates new programs, and a real-world focus on revenue growth, efficiency improvements, and communications and marketing to bring the mission to a broader audience.
